Hey, lady leader. So I'm gonna describe someone, and I want you to tell me if you know her, if you recognize this person. So she is an exceptional person, right? She's exceptional at her job. Her team respects her. She knows the work inside out. She delivers results that actually matter to the business. And she is completely miserable. Not because of the work itself. She loves the work, but because of everything surrounding the work. The politics that she has to navigate outside of her team, the boss who Michael manages her 10% of the time, but casts a shadow over her entire work experience. The values misalignment she's been experiencing and tolerating for years because the salary is so good, it's too good to walk away from. And while she's navigating all of that, she's also trying to get promoted. Does she sound familiar to you? Is she you or is she someone you're working alongside? That's what we're talking
about today. I'm Dr. Nicole Bryan, and this is Leading Her Introvert Way. I've earned 15 promotions over my 30-year career. I went from earning $30,000 a year at an entry-level role to executive vice president, earning close to a million dollars in total compensation annually. I became a multimillionaire in corporate America as a black introverted female, often the only black female in the room, navigating racism, sexism, and spaces that weren't built for me, even when I couldn't always name what I was up against. But honestly, some of the hardest battles weren't just with the system, they were with myself. I didn't always know I was allowed to want senior leadership. I believed the hype about who gets to be an executive and who doesn't. And for a long time, I didn't see myself in that picture. Now I help black introverted women who do want it get out of their own way, see themselves clearly, and claim the leadership roles they were always capable of without waiting for permission or without becoming addicted to work in the process. What that means is I help black introverted women in three ways. The first is I help them get their next leadership promotion without having to leave their company. The second is I help them build and deepen the skills that they need to succeed at the next level. And the third is I help them build high-performing teams with the strategy to make real impact.
Now, let me tell you what I hear from Black women all the time. They'll say to me, I love my team, but I hate the politics outside of it. Or my boss Michael manages me, but I only interact with him 20% of the time, yet it overshadows everything. He makes my life miserable. Or they'll say, My values don't align with this company, but it's a great job. It's a great industry and a great title. Or sometimes they'll say, I want to move into senior leadership, but I'm not getting the visibility. I'm not on the succession plan. I don't feel supported. Here's what's happening: you're experiencing two separate and competing realities simultaneously. And you've been treating them as one problem instead of two. There's an environmental issue, the organization, the culture, the leadership above you, and there's a strategic issue, your advancement approach. You're conflating them into one complaint when they require two completely different responses. Here's the part that you haven't named out loud yet. You're trying to get promoted in a work environment you don't actually want to be promoted in. And I want you to hear that again. You're trying to get promoted in a work environment you actually don't want to be promoted in. That's not a minor tension. That is a fundamental conflict. And your psyche, your body, your nervous system, they already know
it, even if your conscious mind hasn't caught up yet. Let me give you a framework for understanding this. I call this the environment advancement conflict. The environment is the culture, the senior leadership, the values, the day-to-day reality of working there. Your advancement strategy is all the deliberate actions you take to position yourself for promotion. It includes things like building visibility, cultivating sponsors, influencing across functions. When these two things are aligned, when the environment that you're in supports your advancement and your advancement strategy is calibrated to that environment, your promotion is possible. When these two things, though, are misaligned, when the environment depletes you and your advancement strategy has nowhere to land, you stay stuck. And it doesn't matter how hard you work. Think about it like this: imagine you're trying to grow a garden. You've got great seeds, high-quality seeds. You're watering them consistently, you're doing everything right, but the soil is contaminated, the pH is off, there's not enough sunlight, the foundation is completely wrong. You can work harder, you can water it more, you can buy better fertilizer, but nothing is going to grow in that soil. That's what you're doing when you're trying to advance in an environment that's fundamentally misaligned with who you are and how you lead. Most black women I work with are living in that type of misalignment and they're blaming themselves for not advancing. Now, let me tell you why this matters so much and why it's costing you more than you think.
Advancement at the senior and executive levels consumes psychological resources. When you were moving from individual contributor to manager or from manager to senior manager, you advanced through your individual excellence, delivering results, building expertise, demonstrating reliability. But at the director level, vice president level, senior vice president level, the criteria shifts entirely. Advancement now requires influencing without authority, building coalitions across functions, cultivating sponsors in rooms that you're not in, creating strategic visibility for your work and for your team and your thinking. These are not instinctive skills. They require deliberate investment of energy, of your attention, and of your psychological bandwidth. Here's the problem. If your environment is consuming your bandwidth, managing a micromanaging boss, navigating politics you don't believe in, rationalizing values, misalignment, suppressing your frustration to maintain professionalism, you arrive at the strategic work of advancement already depleted. You can still deliver on your core job, sure. Your individual contribution remains extremely strong. But the surplus energy that you need to build visibility, to deepen relationships with senior leaders, and to position yourself, it's already been spent. Now here's where it gets nuanced. There are two things happening simultaneously. The first is your environment is working against you, and that is completely real. The second is that you may also be contributing to your own invisibility. Not claiming credit, avoiding conflict, playing it safe out of fear of being seen as difficult. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out, but you can't address the internal piece if the external piece is consuming all of your resources. And if you're an introverted black woman in a misaligned environment, you can bet your bottom dollar that you're spending a disproportionate amount of your energy on emotional regulation, managing how you're perceived, suppressing frustration, performing in ways that you don't feel. That's on top of the racial tax of navigating a culture that wasn't designed for you. The compound cost is significant. And the truth is, you cannot optimize your advancement strategy on a depleted system. This is not a motivation problem. It's a resource allocation
problem. Now let me say something that might be a little unpopular. We as black women put way too much onus on our employer. We give our employer too much weight over our mental and emotional health. The fact of the matter is our relationship with our employer is a business relationship. It's not a personal one, but it is a business one. Yet we tend to expect things from our employer that we don't even expect from any other relationship that we have in any other aspect of our lives. And I'm guilty of this myself because in my younger days, before I had to learn the tough lesson about treating my relationship with my employer and with my job as a business relationship, I made this mistake too. The fact is, we as black women are so used to pouring everything we have mentally, physically, emotionally, into all the things that we do that we've made the mistake of doing that with our employers as well. What we've done is we've confused our career with the job. And here's the distinction: the job is the work that you do for your employer at any given moment in time. Your career stays with you. It centers with you. It doesn't matter who you're working for, your career goes with you. It's cumulative. Your experiences, your education, your training, all of that is your career, and all of that goes with you over time. But what we've done is we've poured everything that we are into the job versus into our careers. And that is a huge, huge mistake. And we pay for it every single day. How? Well, we take it personally. Every time our employer does something that we don't like, it is a personal affront to us because we have given our heart over to our employer. We have literally given our minds over to our employer. But it's just a business relationship. We expect our employer to give us everything we want and everything that we need. And when we don't get that from our employer, we take it as a personal affront. Whereas we don't expect that same give me everything I need 100% of the time from any other relationship. We don't expect that from our spouse. We don't expect it from our children, we don't expect it from our girlfriends. But the minute that our employer does something that we don't like, we are up in arms. We're telling everybody who's willing to listen because we're caught up in our feelings for days, for weeks, for years. But if we were able to treat that relationship as a professional one, not leading with our emotions, not leading with you owe me this, but with this is the contract. I'm going to do X for Y and you're going to give me S for T. If we were able to treat it with that type of objectivity, then we would be able to leverage it for what we want and what we need. We would also be able to make proactive decisions about what we're going to give and invest in it. What I spend a lot of time doing with my clients is helping them divest themselves from having their identity aligned with their company or with their job. Because frankly, once you give all of that over to them, you're relinquishing your individuality. You're relinquishing your mobility, you're relinquishing your power. Your career is yours. The job is theirs. Don't
confuse the two. So before you can build an advancement strategy, before you can think about getting promoted, you have to answer a question you've been putting off. And here it is. Is this the right organization for the next chapter of my career? Now don't get it twisted. This is not a question about quitting. This is a question about strategic clarity for your career. And before I walk you through the three possible answers, let me just say this. I never, ever, ever want any black woman to feel like she doesn't have options. That's why I do the work that I do. I want to make sure that we as black women have all the options that are available to us now. Options that our ancestors fought for, options that our mothers and our mothers' mothers and our mothers' mothers' mothers fought their asses for, worked their fingers to the bone for. It was to ensure that we and the generations that come after us, we didn't have to endure anything close to what they endured. And not only that we didn't have to endure it, but that we thrived. And the fact that so many of us are professional women, this is not what we went to school for. This is not what we got through college for. This is not what our parents fought for us to achieve, only for us to feel locked in again, only to feel handcuffed again, only to feel like we are trapped in our jobs again. It's just that now we're trapped in a different environment than maybe what our parents and their parents were trapped in. But trapped is trapped. And so for me, I don't really care what the company is saying, what your boss is saying to you, what the system might be saying or even doing, because I am here to say that I am living proof that you can get what you want and what you need out of your boss, out of your work environment, and out of this system. You do not have to stay trapped. And if you're in a position where you feel like you don't have an alternative, then I'm here to tell you that you do. You have alternatives. What those alternatives are may look different between you and the system next to you, but you do have options. And it's really a matter of defining what your options are and frankly deciding what you're willing to do to take advantage of those options.
Now, at the recording of this episode, we are in a job market that belongs to the employer. And what I mean by that is that there are so many professional people who are unemployed right now, who have been displaced from their full-time positions. And as a result, if you're in the market, you're feeling it. You're submitting your applications, and it feels like they're going into the abyss. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones to get an interview, but you're not hearing back from the recruiter. Maybe you're even luckier and you're making it to the second and third rounds, but you're not getting the offer. I've had two people reach out to me in the last couple of weeks to explain that that is their experience. It could be their interview style, or it could be that the market is flooded right now. You're not competing against yourself or two or three other people for every open role. These days, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are applying. So if it's an employer's market, this is the time for you to really think about whether or not you want to see if you can make things work with your current employer or you want to go out on the open market. It's a decision that has to be made. There is no right or wrong answer. It's just a decision that you need to make as part of your strategy. So here are the three possible answers to the question: is this the right organization for the next chapter of my career? Option one, yes, this organization can support my advancement. If the environment is fixable, if the politics are navigable, if the values alignment is tolerable, if there are sponsors who can advocate for you, then the work is to build your internal advancement strategy with full commitment. That means you have the ability to resolve the cognitive dissonance, deciding to invest, deploying your energy accordingly, you stop hedging, you stop complaining, absolutely commit. Option two is no, the organization cannot give me what I want. If the environment is fundamentally incompatible with your advancement, if the culture actively penalizes your leadership style, if there are no sponsors available to you, and if the values misalignment is corrosive, then the most strategic move that you can take is to prepare to leave on your own terms, not reactively, strategically. What that looks like for you is that you start building your leadership brand. You start cultivating external sponsors, you create market visibility, right? Position yourself for a move that advances you rather than displaces you. And yes, even in this market, that is possible. It just requires intentionality and time. Option number three at your disposal is I don't know yet, right? You don't know, you don't have the answer to the question that we're asking, which is is this the right organization for the next chapter of my career? You don't know. And let me just say that if you don't know, that ambiguity is information right there. That is data that you can use because it usually means that you haven't done the honest assessment that you need to do. And the honest assessment requires you to look at the environment objectively, not through the lens of what you wish it were, but through the lens of what the evidence actually shows. You cannot build a promotion strategy on an unresolved question about whether you even want to be promoted there in your current environment.
Okay, so you know how I do. I'm usually by the end of our conversations every week, I'm giving you something to either think about or some action to take. So here's your one thing for this week. I want you to answer these three questions honestly, okay? Not aspirationally, not in terms of maybe one day. I want you to answer these three questions from your current day perspective, where you are right now. Question number one: Is there at least one senior leader in this organization who actively advocates for me? Not who could advocate for you, but one that you know of who actively advocates for you, who thinks highly of you, who believes in your skills and your abilities? Is there at least one senior leader in the organization? Question number two, does the culture of your organization reward the kind of leadership that you're building? Or does it penalize it? And question number three. If I receive the promotion I'm working toward, would I actually want to be doing that job in this organization? If you answered no to two or more of those questions, you now have the strategic clarity you've been avoiding. And listen, that is not a reason to panic. It's a reason for you to plan. Now, if this episode gave you clarity on something you've been avoiding, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to share it with one woman in your network who needs to hear it. And if you want to understand where you actually are in your leadership journey and what your next strategic move should be, then come back next week because I'm releasing a free resource that will help you do exactly that. Until next time, Lady Leader, keep leading your introvert way.